Controversial Huawei signs up to Intel E5

Yep, it makes servers, and it's doing rather well

For the first time, industry talking-point Huawei is going to list to the long line of companies which has Intel Inside. Huawei will use Intel's latest just-announced Xeon architecture, the E5-2600. There will be 22 servers launching in 2012 with the Intel E5-2600. For now, Huawei launched six servers, with four commercially available already.

Intel's spokesperson at Huawei's CeBit press conference revealed that until a couple of weeks ago, Huawei was more like "who-are-they?" - his words. Storage is becoming much smarter because it needs to be, and, of course, that is why Huawei has gone for putting Intel under the bonnet of its new servers.

The move to Intel, according to Johann Strauss, Huawei's director of IT product lines, is part of the company's green efficiency and application acceleration. Strauss asked the audience whether it was aware of Huawei's IT strategy. He was greeted with silence, however, he quickly pointed out that plenty of big players are asking Huawei directly to build them cloud and server products, especially by the major carriers who serve 50 million or so people. Its own internal structure is based on its own products - Huawei runs one of the largest clouds in the world, internally.

"To fuel the cloud you need to be fast," Strauss said, "it's not enough to use standard CPUs, we built our own motherboards to build servers." He said that because Huawei has to build its own compact servers, it has to be greener to get the scale right. When it comes to cloud, power is also important to do, Strauss said. "You need to put a lot of processing power in the smallest space you can find."

Huawei Enterprise, it transpired, makes everything under the sun. It also announced a line of also announced

Elsewhere, execs were keen to point out Huawei Enterprise's success. David Hu, president of marketing at Huawei Enterprise, noted that the group was formally established only roughly one year ago. Despite that, in 2011, it managed to earn $3.8 billion and is now supporting infrastructure across a wide range of market segments, including, government, public sector, transportation, and commercial business enterprise IT. And its ambitions are lofty. Huawei Enterprise expects to be earning $15 billion by 2015.

Meanwhile, Geoff Johnson, research vice president at Gartner, said that Huawei is especially well placed to be a top player. Its work in telepresence will propel it "straight to the boardroom", where execs who otherwise might not be fussed about core technology will be impressed at its efforts.

"If I was to say how we should think about Huawei, particularly enterprise, it can provide products that let you build your own networks," Johnson said. "DIY."

Gartner doesn't think the unified communications industry will be populated by a single vendor - it's going to be a multi vendor environment - and Huawei is well positioned to be one of them.

A spokesperson said that he and Huawei understood why the USA would worry about it as a company, because it is a natural talking point in the industry. He assured TechEye that the company is more transparent than ever and is having frequent conversations with the US authorities.